Bioinformatician resurfaces 21-year-old "antedisciplinary science" essay, says a new field is being born

lpachter · x · 2026-09-24

Computational biologist Lior Pachter recommends Sean Eddy's classic 2005 PLOS Computational Biology essay on "antedisciplinary" science. Eddy pushed back against NIH's celebration of "team science," arguing that breakthroughs often come from spaces that don't yet belong to any discipline—disciplines are labels granted after the fact. Pachter uses the essay to argue we are now witnessing the birth of a new discipline: mathematics engineering.

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